Book Review: "The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas"

Janek Wasserman's Marginal Revolutionaries is not so much an intellectual history of Austrian scholarship as a sociological history of a group of scholars who were initially united by geography and eventually were influential in many international research and policy institutions. While the book contains an interesting social narrative of the Austrian school, it falls short in its general economic understanding. A mischaracterization of the Methodenstreit and a serious misunderstanding of Wieser mar the book, as does a politicized ad hominem in the conclusion.

A History of American Law

This book is a general history of the legal system of the United States, beginning in the colonial period, and continuing up to the present. The work was originally published in 1973; this is the fourth edition, which brings the material up to date and incorporates recent research. The book covers the changing configurations of commercial law, criminal law, and family law, and the law of property; lays great stress on race relations, especially black-white relations; it deals also with the legal profession and legal education. The approach throughout is geared toward an intelligent lay audience. Legal jargon is avoided. The underlying theory of the book is that law is the product of society, so that what is attempted, in essence, is a more or less sociological history of the legal system, as it evolved over the years.

Agrarian Twilight in Rural West Java: from Accumulation to Exclusion

Through this research, the phenomenon of agrarian twilight in rural West java was analyzed by the interactions of agrarian relations, the exclusion process, and actors that involved due to the agrarian history. With the implementation of a critical paradigm by multi method of qualitative research (historical sociology and sociological history) and case study approach, this research releases a deep study of space, temporality and contention so that it can reveal a fundamental problems inequality of agrarian structures in rural West Java from the era colonial up to the present situation. This research was conducted for six months starting from May to October 2018, primary data were collected by in-depth interviews with peasants as key informants of this research and supported by various secondary research data and other relevant documents. The data thereafter analyzed by means of three phases, as interpretative, empirical, and dialectical technique. The results showed that the erosion of the agricultural sector by the industrial and service sectors were complemented by the shrinking of agriculture land due to the conversion of agriculture land to non-agriculture. Historically, agrarian twilight was an alteration from the land accumulation by corporations that further lead to the exclusion of peasants from their land, with the period of time from colonial to the present situation. Unequal access to land, increasing land markets, power, and capital were the triggered. This situations conduced that peasants who directly faced changes in rural agrarian structure were cornered to the most vulnerable position. This condition shows the description of agrarian twilight in rural West Java.

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Jacques Le Goff. – Birth of a social category, and discipline.

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages: birth of a social category, and alsosimultaneously discipline. A radical book – important to history likefew are: with this small monograph, Jacques Le Goff created “historicalsociology” or “sociological history”; and liberated countless others.

Intimate Pleasures and the Madness of Love

Chapter 7 analyzes the real sex films Ken Park and Irréversible in the context of different sexual/social aesthetics in sexually explicit films by drawing on “old” and “new” forms of narrative theory as a “bridging synthesis” of disciplinary approaches. The different generations of narrative theory alluded to in this chapter concern Will Wright’s old critical realist analysis of the Western genre and Tanya Krzywinska’s new, postmodernist “narrative formula” approach. This chapter opens with narrative comparison of one European and one US real sex film to point to their similar narrative reversals and contradictions in the context of the “normal chaos of love,” with a major focus on Ken Park’s narrative. Wright’s and Krzywinska’s theoretically and generationally different versions of narrative theory are thus drawn together in terms of current risk sociological history and distinguished from each other epistemologically for further consideration in later chapters.